Poetry Series Sonny Rainshine - poems - Publication Date: 2008 Publisher: Poemhunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive Sonny Rainshine() Education: MA English; BA French. Profession: Software trainer for health care organization. Hobbies: Avid reader and movie buff. Light hiking and long walks in the woods. Favorite Poets: Wallace Stevens Robert Frost Robinson Jeffers Antonio Machada Rilke Most of the 19th century Romantics, William Carlos Williams, and a host of others. Poetic philosophy: I look for both interesting form and content in the poetry I read and that I compose. They do go hand-in-hand. If one has something to say, it's necessary to say it well. www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 1 1 Is Easy One sex, one race, one religion, one face. One thought, one nation, one dream, one altercation— One is easy. But gender, belief, and ethnicity, patriots and pariahs, authenticity, need not tender strife and bewilderment. Two sexes and all between, a spectrum of creeds, not one, maybe fourteen, and dreams innumerable, left balancing right, one is not enough for any human heart. One is easy but one is not enough. Sonny Rainshine www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 2 100 Fireflies He stayed up half the night collecting one hundred fireflies in a mason jar. Just before midnight he unscrewed the lid and released them inside the screen porch. Next door a man leaps high and says to his wife: Oh! Magic! Sonny Rainshine www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 3 21st Century Rant Growth! Progress! Expansion! Then downsize it all when it gets too bloated, and if that doesn’t work, lower the borrowing rates so that the downsized people can get become Better Consumers and get deeper in debt. Encourage the poor to buy that home with the white picket fence, even though they can barely make ends meet, then who will be the one to tell them that the payments are too high and foreclosure is the only answer? Can we at least keep the white picket fence? they ask. I suppose there was a time when people went shopping only when they needed to buy bread and things to live on; When did it become a citizen’s duty to keep the economy afloat while filling our homes with worthless junk, all bought on credit? The time has come to pause..... Sonny Rainshine www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 4 3 Seconds Before The Shot The brown doe for a moment mesmerizes the boys in camouflage, broadcasting a telepathic message: I stand before you here, majestic as Nature, graceful as a ballerina, my beauty is never-ending and will lodge in your heart, as the bullet will in mine long after this deed is done. Sonny Rainshine www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 5 A Bow To Film Noir Still warm on the scarlet chaise: a silver pistol, small enough to fit into a purse; lethal enough to send a man to his reward. Sprawled on the thick-piled royal blue carpet: a man savoring his reward, handsome, immaculately suited, dead. The woman at the window: relaxed, confidant, smiling, flicks the ashes from a Lucky Strike and watches the flickering neon sign outside the sleazy motel. Vacancy; VACANCY; vacancy; VACANCY; vacancy; VACANCY; That’s a laugh, she thought, eyes gazing vacantly. Sonny Rainshine www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 6 A Homeopathy Of The Heart You sprinkle fresh ginger on your rice, and spearmint enhances your tea. Your hair is scented with plumeria leaves, but your heart lies unseasoned and your mind is bland. No rich condiments can be found in your conversation. Come out of your misty world of aromatherapy and esoteric alchemy and reveal to me the ordinary magic hidden in there. Sonny Rainshine www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 7 A Leaf Refuses To Fall The leaves don’t let go that easily either. It takes a bluster, a filabuster of north wind, and the wasp-sting of the first chill of late September to tear them off the page of summer. Persuasion doesn’t do it. Sometimes in the middle of winter, (the DEAD of winter, as they say) you might see one shriveled oakleaf, dangling from a frozen filament of stem, defiant, victorious. Nothing likes to end; the October wind invites the leaf to tango in the frosty air. A shy curtsey, a twirling turn, a pirouette, then the dance is over and only the bare fingers of the tree remain. Sonny Rainshine www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 8 A Thousand Times Bitten Bobby became a misanthrope after losing hope in the goodness of man. He found he could not cope with the everyday stings of human malice and he became callused, despondent. Time after time he offered his heart to his fellow beings in part because, like all of us, he needed love and hoped to rise above the cynicism of antisocial attitude. But people like Bobby collapse like the sensitive plant when touched, and repeated unkindnesses caused him to lose the hope he clutched in what it means to be human. Now he lives among us all, separated by an invisible wall that protects but also banishes him from experiencing the warmth and joy of the common ground of being human; this man has become an island, severed and free from you and me. Sonny Rainshine www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 9 A Wealth Of Piety He prayed to Christ; he prayed to Krishna; he even wished upon a star. He said a novena; he chanted esoteric mantras; he bought a rabbit’s foot. He journeyed to Mecca; he knelt at the Wailing Wall; he crossed his fingers and hoped to die. He studied Kabbala; he pored over astrological tables; he paid the palm reader generously. After years of supplications; litanies, liturgies, and libations; after sacrifices and renunciation of his sins and shortcomings, he at last became a wealthy man at 98 years old and died with his fingers still crossed. Sonny Rainshine www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 10 A Wilderness Without You Particles of our last conversation fuse with the droplets of mist, and the last word you said, goodbye, hovers below the lush hemlocks, then descends to the needled forest floor alighting like a toy parachute. What remains is the primitive splendor a wilderness affords, of places shielded from “development” and man’s fixation with houses and office space from materials once round, now cubed and planed. Sand and wood transmogrified. The quieting balm of running water and the whisper of wind through the spruce trees was always enough to salve my bruised soul, the chafed cicatrix of every day living. But now, that curative essence is diminished, the empty space right next to me that once held your form and your laughter seems colder than before, less real. It was always you and nature, nature and you, for so many years. I see a long, long season ahead in which I must become acquainted with nature and loneliness, loneliness and nature and a million other wildernesses. Sonny Rainshine www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 11 After The Rain One Chinese lantern, forgotten when the lawn party was spoiled by a summer downpour, waves in the drizzly wind from a nylon string. Something sad in the air comingles with the fragrance of yellow jasmine, yes yellow jasmine. Sonny Rainshine www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 12 After The Sonnet Ends After the sonnet ends it begins. The final word glistens suspended on a string like an industrious spider on strands slender as pins, like a trapeze artist’s precarious swing. The minstral invites you to take the gift of vases of words and decanters of wit and parse them in your mind and shift the meanings and the mores to fit the memories of music and rhyme in the repository of your mind and perhaps to recall some other time, and in the recollection find another starting point where the thought ends, still another meaning where the line bends. Sonny Rainshine www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 13 After Words Marlene, a famous grammarian, spent her final years if-ing and because-ing and whether-ing, neither-ing and nor-ing: trying to connect the intricate clauses of her past. In her younger years she had to-d and before-d, of-d and until-d, making each preposition a loaded proposition dangling at the corner of her lips. She smeared her middle years with nouns, like Love and Beauty, and her yearning for immortality was reflected in her use of infinitives: to live, to engage, to aspire, to create. Now, at 94, she feels that language has betrayed her; she wonders if she has identified the mechanics of speech, the expression of living, but failed to see the underlying current behind the words. In conquering speech so precisely, in defining so eloquently the meaning of being alive, she has neglected to live it. Sonny Rainshine www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 14 Age Of Degeneration As to the fate of the universe, some who claim to know maintain that it is expanding, not contracting, and is simple to explain. Two final phases, then eternity, the Age of Degeneration, then the Age of Photons, will thus ignite a continuum of illumination. In the penultimate phase, things will disintegrate; the fabric of matter will rip apart, molecules will disseverate. In the last phase, In the last phase, all that will remain, are tiny flickers of light, off and on, like fireflies, electrifying the night.